Soviet Steel – The Mammoth Heavy Walker

This large and in charge Russian Walker is a significantly heavy beastie and comes in a number of large castings.

We have a large single piece body, a front plate for the lower glacis plate of the hull and a dozer blade in one packet.

In the other packet we have the 4 (yes that’s 4!) turrets, 4 legs and a metal cast rail to go around the top turret.

The turret railing for the top turret is my one and only gripe in this kit. It’s very fiddly to fit, requires bending to fit by hand and could have done with some indentations in the turret cast itself to help ham-fisted modellers like myself line up the pegs correctly. They do go on however with patience and time.

I did get some shots of the Mammoth as I put it together and I will be using these in another article shortly, where I will do a magnetising model kits for ham-fisted modellers.

So, minor rail induced rage apart, the kit goes together like a dream. There was a small amount of warping on the front plate that required warm water to help and then a little green stuff to fill the gaps. There weren’t massive gaps and again, I would expect this to be well within the grasp of an experienced modeller. All in all the whole kit (including fiddly rail and filling gaps etc) took about an hour to assemble. Not bad at all for a model of it’s size.

Once built the kit is very intimidating on the table. It’s twice the height of most tanks (barring the Kv-2 maybe), on the tabletop it looks like a real monster. There’s lots of lovely deep detail and I’m going to really enjoy weathering and streaking my kit at some point soon.

Yes, yes I hear you shout, but what’s it like on the table?

Expensive. At 445 points for a regular version or 525 points for the veteran it’s not cheap. The more eagle eyed amongst you will point out that base cost for the Mammoth is 420 points. In my opinion you take it with the dozer blade every time. I’ll explain why shortly.

The armament of the Mammoth is very impressive. A Light howitzer in the turret, front mounted heavy howitzer, front left mounted light auto cannon and rear right mounted light auto cannon complete the firepower. This thing (if it hits) is the death of infantry and is capable of handing out pins as if they were going out of fashion!

It’s armour 10 all the way around and this (imo) is why you take the dozer blade. For 25 points you get a 5+ save against any penetrating hits from the front arc. That’s a must have for a model of this size with armour that is comparatively weak when you consider that this is going to be top of every opposition general’s kill list.

The Good

There are 4 weapon systems on the Mammoth, all capable of dealing with light vehicles and infantry and with the heavy howitzer being the death of units, small teams and even medium tanks and walkers with a decent roll on the damage table.

It’s possible to hit 4 different targets in one turn spreading the love of pins. Its also possible to concentrate three weapon systems on the same target, when the only solution is dust of and nuke it from orbit, the Mammoth should give you that reliability!

It looks cool, I mean not just a little bit cool, REALLY cool. This model makes a statement and brings all the boys to the yard. If you want to get people playing K47 in your area, put one of these in your demo games..

The Bad

It Costs How much??? You need to hit pretty much every shot with every weapon for two turns (at least) to have a chance of making those points out of your enemies army.

Close combat. Whilst it hits like a truck at range, a squad of 4 nachtjaegers will eat this and still have space (and pace) left to eat the rest of your army. With no MMG’s you can’t overwatch fire at them on the way in. For such an imposing beastie, it has a massive achilles heel. Literally.

The Ugly

It’s beautiful and big. Yes you can hide behind buildings and still shoot things but you’re rarely, if ever, going to get anything more than light cover. This, on an expensive armour 10 walker is going to leave you with the coolest model in the dead pile if you’re not either very careful, or very lucky, or both.

Efficiency. This is where I take off my fluffy Russian Generals hat and break out my pocket organiser and do geeky sums. An IS-2 is more survivable and far more likely to get it’s points back (at half the cost too!). The biggest risk to the Mammoth in my armour lists is that an SU-76 is the same at killing tanks, can drop HE like the top turret and costs 1/5 of the points, giving me 400 points (almost) to spend on Daughters of the Motherland, Siberian Fanatics, or Ursus Warriors, all of which will terrify my opponent and dilute his fire as he tries to focus on multiple fast moving, resilient threats flooding over the battlefield at him.

TL/DR this is the coolest model I’ve ever built. It will take pride of place in my gaming cabinet when finished. I will run it whenever I can in games and it will make my opponents very very very happy when they make me take it off, every game, in turn 1! This isn’t a game about winning, it’s a game about having fun and on those days I delete a unit in one round of fire from my Mammoth, it will all be worth it!

N.B any followers of the Facebook K47 group may have missed a conversation that we had discussing the possibility of a ZP turret for the Mammoth. The creators of K47 have said that different turrets for the heavy walkers with possibly new Rift Tech Weaponry are on their to do list. There’s no confirmation yet when, and they’ve asked for our patience but it may well turn this model from being an expensive risky choice to an absolute game changer. Another reason why you may wish to visit my Magnetising Models article when it pops up!